Author Archives: Brian

25 Tips for improving conversion rates in your online store

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If you’ve already set up your own online store, or you’re just starting an online business, there are many things you’ll need to do to ensure the success of your new online business.

This article is the second in a series of articles designed to help you get the most out of your online store. In my last post, I covered ways to increase traffic to your online store.  If you follow our tips to increase your traffic, then more orders should start coming in.

If you follow the tips below to increase your conversion rate, then you could effectively reduce your advertising costs, whilst converting more of your visitors to buyers.

In e-commerce marketing, a conversion rate is the percentage of unique visitors to your online store who actually buy something.

Generally, if your store is laid out well, and you have good product descriptions and images and your products are reasonably priced, you should achieve at least a 1% to 2% conversion rate.

That can be easily increased to 3% if you follow the tips below.  If you go further than what we suggest, you can increase your conversion rate even further. Continue reading →

Marketing your new online store

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Increasing traffic to your online storeThis may come as a shock to people starting a new online store, but the days of “If you build it, they will come” are well and truly over.  Just creating an online store doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly going to become an overnight Amazon.com

To be successful selling online, you will need to market your online store. If you don’t… you’re really wasting your time.  Seriously.

Over the next couple of weeks starting today, I’ll be publishing tips on how to increase traffic to your online store, how to improve conversion rates in your online store, and going into further detail about our proven methods for doing so.

At the end of the day, you can take our recommendations with a grain of salt, but be warned… if you don’t do any of the things that we recommend, your store just isn’t going to succeed!

So here’s the first instalment for you…  20 sure-fire ways to increase traffic to your online store. Continue reading →

Sneak peek: New toolbox changes

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Just thought we should let you know that we’re making a few changes to your Toolbox tomorrow afternoon, and over the coming weeks.

The first thing you’ll notice is that we have a new, fresher colour scheme.  We’re streamlining the design to make things a lot clearer and easier to find.

The second thing you may notice is that we’ve added a new “Getting started” section to the dashboard to make it easier for new store owners to get their store up and running.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be adding in new enhancements to help make managing your store a lot easier, so stay tuned!

Migrating to the new Australia Post shipping carrier

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One of the major changes in our recent software upgrade has been in the way we deal with the Australia Post shipping rate calculator.  This article outlines the changes that you should make to your online store to take advantage of the new features.

In our old system, each of the rates was added individually as a separate shipping rate.  The store owner chose which Australia Post rates were to be added to the shipping rates for each country. So, for domestic shipping, you could add “Regular Parcel Post” or “Express Parcel Post”.

Similarly for international shipping, you had a range of options from “Air Mail”, “Sea Mail” and some courier options.

With our new improved “Shipping carriers” model, the new Australia Post shipping carrier can now be activated globally, and you can specify which rates you wish to support in your ecommerce store.

Continue reading →

International shipping with FedEx now available

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We’re pleased to announce that Spiffy Stores now includes FedEx shipping calculations in your store checkout, in addition to the current support for Australia Post.

To accommodate this, we’ve created a new section in your Store Toolbox (in the Shipping & handling section of your preferences) for “Shipping agents”.

To enable international shipping by FedEx, you just need to go to the “Shipping and handling” section in your Store Toolbox, and click on the “Add shipping agent” button.  You’ll need to have an account with FedEx to take advantage of this.

When you’ve got that sorted, customers visiting your online store from overseas will be able to select FedEx as a shipping method in the checkout, and view real-time shipping prices.

We’ve also changed the way the Australia Post shipping is handled.  We’ve now updated your current Australia Post shipping methods to use the new Australia Post carrier.  Please go to your Store Toolbox and review your shipping rates and ensure that they’re set up correctly.

New functionality you say?  It includes adding extra handling days, extra handling costs, and default fall-back pricing just in case the FedEx or AusPost sites fail…. but you’ll have to come back tomorrow to find out more, or login to your Store Toolbox to have a look.

PayPal Express now available

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If you’re especially observant, you may have noticed the PayPal Express Checkout button in the Showtime Theme demo that we posted yesterday.  I can confirm that yes! PayPal Express Checkout has been added to Spiffy Stores, and can be set up to replace (or along-side) the PayPal option in the checkout.

Enabling Paypal Express Checkout in your store should help decrease the number of abandoned carts/orders that store owners experience who rely on PayPal to process transactions, as it takes the customer directly to the PayPal checkout from the shopping cart page to place their order.

We’ve been hard at work adding a little tag to everyone’s store to support the new feature, and it’s been included in all of the Spiffy Stores e-commerce themes.  If you’ve somehow missed out, and want to add the button to your store, there are instructions on how to do this in our knowledge base.